Picture Quality
Reprinted from "Crown Jewels of the Wire", July 2006, page 24
Here at Crown Jewels we just love it when collectors email us their
photographs to use in the magazine.
But for various reasons, we often have to write back and ask that the
pictures be sent again. We don't want to discourage anyone; and so we thought
we'd publish examples of the problems we often write back about.
Above is a picture the in size collectors often send us: 4 inches tall
by 3 inches wide at 72 DP!. The low resolution works well for email. It can be
sent and received quickly. You can store a lot of pictures on a memory stick or
CD. But the resolution just doesn't work well for publishing. The level we
prefer for publishing is 300 DP!.
Let's say we wanted to use this picture, but at the best quality possible. If
we boost the DPI to 300, then the maximum size the picture could be for printing
would be 1.2 inches tall and .93 wide as show below. Hmm, that's really not a
sufficiently large size.
Obviously we think readers want to see images of insulators that are larger
than this. Ok, so what would happen if we decided to just go ahead and print the
picture in a size we typically would use. So we blow up the tiny picture to
three inches high by 2.3 inches wide.
Here's what that looks like:
Well, that doesn't print in as sharp a quality as we would like either.
So what we would have done is write back to the collector and ask for the
picture to be retaken, or to be sent in full original size. In this case, that
was 27 inches high by 21 inches wide at 72 DPI.
While that's way too large to show in a magazine, it gives us something to
work with.
Now we can reduce the image to three inches high by 2.3 inches wide at 300
DPI and get useable quality:
So please don't take offense if we should ever ask you to resend a photo.
Here at Crown Jewels, we are all in a learning mode. And if we work together,
the magazine will just get better and better.
Thanks,
Linda & Howard
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